Daybook

My new plan is to whine more often. Eighteen comments on that entry about how people don't comment! Cynthia was right; whiners are well-compensated in blogland.

My other new plan is to steal an idea from TJ and inaugurate Sunday Some -- tomorrow! -- featuring some of the blogs I've enjoyed over the previous week.

I'm working on a paper on movies about St. Francis, so in the last couple of days I've watched Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis and Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon. One an artistic post-World War II look at transformation and redemption, the other a 1970s hippy version of conflict and drama in an incredibly clean medieval Italy in which Donovan sings. Clare is a paragon of beauty and virtue in both; Francis is way too beautiful in the second. But I'm happy.

Most recent novel read: A Thread of Grace. All I can say is: go and get it and start reading. The Jews and the Italian Resistance movement during World War II.

And while you're at it, pick up Mary Doria Russell's other two novels. I haven't read the middle one yet. I was telling one of my colleagues ~ a young rabbi ~ about A Thread of Grace yesterday, and he said his wife had just purchased it. Then we talked about The Sparrow and he started laughing and said, "If you're going to have science fiction with priests, they would have to be Jesuits."

The novels do, in a strange kind of way, fit with the Francis films.

The Holocaust does , too, except that it fits with nothing. This past Tuesday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. One of the survivors who spoke at our school, once a Czechoslovakian youth, now a retired cabinetmaker, told about getting off the train at Auchswitz, where Joseph Mengele was the man pointing, "Left, Right." His mother and sisters were sent in the direction of murder. No good-byes, only the horrific, screaming, gasping deaths of young women and little girls as Zyklon B poured out of the shower heads. He and his father and brothers were sent the other way. He was eventually transported to Buchenwald, where he was saved with, quite literally, minutes to spare, by the delaying tactics of a Christian political prisoner and a terrified young Jewish boy, and the surprising arrival of Allied planes overhead.

Francis in the fields of Umbria and my students' teenaged grandfather carrying the stones at Buchenwald. What I've learned this week. No whining allowed.